GenAI and AI Agent explorations typically begin in technology and engineering teams—a natural starting point. Yet, organizations are quickly finding that the impacts of GenAI extend far beyond these teams' remits. GenAI adoption shifts roles, sparks new ways of working, and challenges skills that employees have honed over their careers. So the question becomes: What is the role of HR teams to shape the transition?

Organizations that bring the Technology and People sides of the business together to co-lead GenAI tend to advance quicker. Without that partnership, deployments are slowed with friction mounting from fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Bringing the People/HR voice in as a co-lead from the start is crucial, as introducing GenAI isn't just a technology shift—it's a human and work transformation: expanding roles, unleashing skills, and raising questions about contributions that employees may have honed over their careers.

Organizations are overestimating their own nimbleness in adapting to the pace of GenAI change, often because they're relying on frameworks like Agile that were built for a different era of transformation. Agile was designed to help teams move faster within known systems and predictable constraints. But AI is not just another software rollout—it's a fundamentally different kind of change. It's fast-evolving and deeply ambiguous. What once gave organizations confidence and control can now create false security and slow their ability to truly adapt.

Our data suggests that large enterprises—with their deep infrastructure, mature technology teams, and vast budgets—are able to launch into AI exploration quickly by piloting and exploring a wide range of possibilities early.

But size soon becomes drag. Bureaucracy, complexity, and legacy processes slow the movement from prototype to scaled adoption. Meanwhile, mid-size and smaller organizations—unencumbered and more nimble—are often moving faster into implementation, scaling, and optimization.

Our learning: However adept organizations are at launching pilots, those that cannot evolve their methods to scale quickly risk being outpaced by those that can.

The bolder bets on GenAI and agentic workflows are unleashed by the support of the CEO.

In the most successful examples, the CEO not only facilitates innovation and maintains a tight connection to business strategy, but also creates the conditions that enable other leaders—including CTOs and CHROs—to take part in the work.

Organizations with AI centers of excellence that bring together the voices of technology, people, culture, and business strategy are moving more quickly into scaling agentic workflows. They're also showing how new ways of working—imagined holistically for their business—can unlock growth.